Who needs this technology stuff anyway?

I have a confession to make. I’m not really an ‘early adopter’ when it comes to new technology.

I suppose I object to using something, just because it’s new when the old one still works well enough. Some of it might be the farmer in me. After all, we’re in an industry which has been going strong for five thousand years or more. I suspect that after the first two or three millennia you get a bit jaded when yet another bright young thing comes along with the invention that’s going to turn the world upside down.
In ‘Queen Mary’s House’ in Jedburgh I saw a billhook, found at the battlefield
at Flodden where it had been dropped in 1513. It would take a standard modern handle. The ‘design parameters’ for a billhook were laid down a thousand years ago, and there has been no need to update them. I’ll try and fit a picture in about here so you know what I’m talking about.

Then there are sheep shears. If I can cope with the technology there should be a picture of some bronze sheep shears found in Flag Fen, still in their carrying case!

I’m a believer in the fact that appropriate technology doesn’t die. Indeed you know those big black wrapped silage bales? To get the wrap off, in winter I’ve been know to carry a piece of flint in my pocket, because flint cuts that stuff better than steel.

At this point I’d better mention my mobile phone. It’s a nokia, it’ll do texts (but frankly the length of time it takes me to text, it’s faster to visit.) and of course I can talk to people on it. Or I can when it’s switched on, because as we don’t have signal here, it spends most of its life switched off in a drawer. OK it’s an elderly, probably obsolete phone, but it does ‘switched off in a drawer’ every bit as well as something more modern with all sorts of features.
I suppose that at some point I’ll have to buy a newer phone, but I’ve discovered that I can live perfectly happily without internet access on the move, and because my phone is always switched off, people who want me phone the landline and someone will take a message.
Indeed I’d suggest that landline phones are the way forward. You walk out the house and suddenly no one can get hold of you, so you can do whatever you want, get some work done, whatever, without being bothered by someone desperate to tell you ‘they’re on the train’ or ‘what are you doing at the moment’.